Abstract
According to a Moorean response to skepticism, the standards for knowledge are invariantly comparatively low, and we can know across contexts all that we ordinarily take ourselves to know. It is incumbent upon the Moorean to defend his position by explaining how, in contexts in which S seems to lack knowledge, S can nevertheless have knowledge. The explanation proposed here relies on a warranted-assertability maneuver: Because we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p, it can seem that S does in fact lack that piece of knowledge. Moreover, this warranted-assertability maneuver is unique and better than similar maneuvers because it makes use of H. P. Grice’s general conversational rule of Quantity—“Do not make your contribution more informative than is required”—in explaining why we are warranted in asserting that S doesn’t know that p.
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Notes
Compare Cohen 1999, p. 57; and Rieber 1998, p. 190. Typically, contextualists are concerned with the truth conditions of knowledge-ascribing and knowledge-denying sentences (see, for example, DeRose 1999a, pp. 187–188). Nevertheless, they often “semantically descend” from talk of the truth conditions of such sentences to talk of the standards for knowledge (see DeRose 1999b). Such a semantic descent is permissible, they suggest, as long as we remember that our primary concern is with the truth conditions of certain sentences.
See DeRose 1999c, especially pages 29–33.
DeRose, who has provided what is perhaps the most influential version of epistemological contextualism, introduces his position in DeRose 1992 and in further detail in DeRose 1999c. Other recent and noteworthy versions of epistemological contextualism are those of Cohen 1988, 1999, Lewis 1996, Rieber 1998 and Heller 1999. I should also note that for DeRose, as for several other contextualists, contexts seem to be conversations. So, whatever the criteria are for the individuation of conversations, those same criteria, or at least some very similar ones, will be the criteria for the individuation of contexts.
Compare the apparent conflict between (1), (2) and (3) to the apparent conflict between
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(1*)
I am in Los Angeles
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(2*)
I am not in Los Angeles, and
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(3*)
Either I am in Los Angeles or I am not in Los Angeles (but not both).
The contextualist’s resolution of the apparent conflict between (1), (2) and (3) is similar to a resolution of the apparent conflict between (1*), (2*) and (3*) that notes that it’s Jane who utters (1*) but Matt who utters (2*).
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(1*)
Assertability conditions have to do with the conditions under which we may make certain assertions rather than with the conditions under which those assertions are true.
I do not mean to suggest that Moore was (what I am calling) a Moorean invariantist. The main—and perhaps the only—similarity between Moore and the Moorean is this: each maintains that the standards for knowledge are invariant and that we know across contexts the things we ordinarily take ourselves to know. The Moorean also maintains that the standards for knowledge are invariantly low, but Moore himself might not have agreed with this.
Consider in this regard my belief that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat. I argue in Black 2002 and again in Black 2008 that this belief meets the conditions in a methodized version of Robert Nozick’s “truth-tracking” account of knowledge (see Nozick 1981, p. 179) and thus that I know that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat. If I am to know that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat, my belief as to whether I’m a brain-in-a-vat must track the truth only through the group of worlds in which perception plays a substantial role in producing my belief. Yet no brain-in-a-vat worlds are among this group. Moreover, my belief as to whether I’m a brain-in-a-vat tracks the truth from the actual world to the farthest world in which it is true both that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat and that perception plays a substantial role in producing my belief - throughout the worlds in which I’m not a brain-in-a-vat and in which perception substantially produces my belief as to whether I’m a brain-in-a-vat, I believe that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat. Thus, I know that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat.
Warranted-assertability defenses of Moorean (or moderate invariantist) responses are provided by Rysiew 2001, Blaauw 2003, Brown 2005, 2006, Pritchard 2005; and in outline in Black 2005, 2008. A defense of the Moorean response need not appeal to warranted assertability. See Bach 2005 for a defense that appeals to an error theory.
In DeRose 1999a.
As it is, (MI) is fairly vague, and there are different ways of specifying its standards. Rysiew 2001 prefers to specify them in terms of the relevant alternatives theory of knowledge, according to which S knows that P only if S (or S’s evidence) can distinguish P from all relevant alternatives to P. On this view, (MI)’s standards are comparatively low because they require the elimination of a smaller set of alternatives, a set of alternatives that is in fact a proper subset of the set of alternatives the skeptic requires us to eliminate. Brown 2006 would specify (MI)’s standards “in terms of the range of possible worlds across which one’s belief matches the facts” (p. 424). The Moorean response I propose here can be modified to work with either of these ways of specifying (MI)’s standards.
See DeRose 1999a, pp. 201-203
Here, P is to be kept in the indicative mood.
See Grice 1989a, p. 24. Suppose, as Grice’s famous example goes (see Grice 1989a, p. 33), that A is writing a letter on behalf of a candidate for a job in philosophy. The letter says, “Dear Sir, Mr. X’s command of English is excellent, and his attendance at tutorials has been regular. Yours, etc.” A’s assertions convey the idea that, according to A, Mr. X is no good at philosophy. Nevertheless, A’s assertions do not themselves say that Mr. X is no good at philosophy.
See DeRose 1999a, p. 200.
According to DeRose, his WAM appeals to what he calls the ‘Assert the Stronger’ conversational rule, according to which “when you’re in a position to assert either of two things, then, other things being equal, if you assert either of them, assert the stronger” (DeRose 1999a, p. 197).
Compare DeRose 1999c, p. 185.
DeRose suggests that we should never want to explain away an appearance of truth. Rather, we’d like to preserve truths and to avoid multiplying falsehoods. But even if we should adopt this attitude in general, we can’t always do so. For, in contexts like radical skeptical contexts, which include conflicting appearances of truth, we must maintain that one of the appearances is misleading, and that a proposition that seems true is in fact false.
I regret having to deviate from terminology that is both Rysiew’s and well established in the epistemological literature: I call relevant* alternatives what Rysiew, among many others, calls relevant alternatives. I do this in order to avoid confusion later in the paper between epistemically relevant alternatives and relevant assertions (i.e., assertions made in accordance with Grice’s maxim of Relation, which commands, ‘Be relevant!’).
Grice’s Cooperative Principle says, “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice 1989a, p. 26).
He made this suggestion clear to me in correspondence.
See Grice 1989a, p. 27.
See Grice 1989a, p. 26.
Grice himself suggested that there might be no such distinction; see Grice 1989a, p. 27, where he says that “there is perhaps a different reason for doubt about the admission of [Q2], namely, that its effect will be secured by a later maxim, which concerns relevance.” Horn 1984, Sperber and Wilson 1986, Carston 1998 also maintain that the two are not distinct.
This example is very similar to one provided by van Rooy 2004, p. 16.
See Grice 1989a, p. 32.
The same sort of thing seems to be happening in the following dialogue: A: ‘Can you tell me the time?’; B: ‘Well, the milkman has come’ (see Levinson 1983, pp. 97–8).
We don’t have the option here of saying that our assertion is unwarranted simply because it’s false, for we have set aside accounts of warranted assertability according to which an assertion is warranted only if it is true.
Hawthorne 2001 suggests that we can contextualize the concept of freedom—or, at least, a concept of freedom—in the same way that Lewis 1996 contextualizes the concept of knowledge. But we can defend a “Moorean” view of freedom with an analogue of the WAM proposed above and, if nothing else, this should immunize the proposed WAM against the charge of being ad hoc. Here, all too briefly, is how a warranted-assertability defense of a “Moorean” view of freedom might go: In contexts of wide philosophical reflection, the conversation between us and our interlocutors concerns considerations having to do with “the neurological springs of [S’s] action and then, indeed, [with the fact] that [S’s] actions are the result of the operations of the laws of nature over which [she] had no control, coupled with the distribution of microparticles in the distant past over which [she] had no control” (Hawthorne 2001, p. 67). Further, in such contexts, our interlocutors remind us that given this causal explainer of S’s actions, she would act just as she does now. What is salient to this conversation is a position that is good enough to rule out the possibility that the mentioned causal explainer provides an adequate causal explanation of S’s actions. And given that our conversation is governed by Relation, were we to reply to our interlocutors by asserting ‘S doesn’t freely φ’, we would truly implicate that S does not occupy the salient position. Moreover, our assertion ‘S doesn’t freely φ’ would be made in accordance with the appropriate maxim of strength: Thinking of the chain of causes as continuous and linear, extending from the efficient causes of S’s actions to connected causes that are ever more distant, our assertion ‘S doesn’t freely φ’ does not implicate that S occupies a position that is good enough to rule out possibilities that are too far out on this chain and hence it does not exceed the threshold of informativeness. Thus, our assertion, even though it would be false, would be warranted and could therefore seem true.
We must make reference here to some set of epistemic standards. These standards can be seen as rules that are necessary in order to “work out” the presence of a conversational implicature (and, according to Grice, “[t]he presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being worked out” (Grice 1989a, p. 31)).
‘Relevant’ here is used to mean the same thing as ‘relevant*’.
Our assertion that S doesn’t know that p has the implicature that S cannot eliminate all of the salient alternatives to p. We can cancel this implicature by maintaining that although S doesn’t know that p (because she cannot eliminate all of the relevant* alternatives to p), she nevertheless can eliminate all of the salient alternatives. See Black and Murphy 2005 for more on the cancelability of alleged semantic entailments.
Leite 2005 objects to WAMs like the one proposed above. He says that in a high-standards context, it must be the case that “[t]he speaker believes that he knows, and the hearer recognizes that he believes this. The speaker announces, “I don’t know. I’d better check.” On the assumptions that he isn’t making a slip, semantically confused or in error about his epistemic position and that the moderate invariantist semantics for ‘know’ are correct, the natural conclusion is that he is not acting in accordance with the conversational principles at all. Whatever he is doing, it is completely bizarre” (Leite 2005, pp. 219–220). This is in fact pretty bizarre, and so it’s good that we can perform a WAM without committing ourselves to this sort of story. Those who would perform a WAM in a case in which the speaker is moved to announce in a high-standards context that he doesn’t know that p need not assume that the speaker believes that he knows that p, and this is true especially if, as I propose, we perform a WAM without appealing to a maxim of Quality. Indeed, on the WAM proposed above, given that this is a high-standards context, it’s safe to assume that the speaker takes himself not to know that p. Thus, since it’s a mistake to assume here that the speaker believes that he knows, Leite’s criticism does not hold up.
Of course, this is not to say that the contextualist has no choice but to perform a WAM. The contextualist might appeal to semantic blindness, for example, in explaining away the apparent truth of the assertion that I know that I have hands. Contextualists usually appeal to semantic blindness in order to explain why we have the powerful intuition in some cases that “two speakers [one of whom asserts that she knows, and the other of whom asserts, in the very same context, that she doesn’t know] are contradicting one another” (DeRose 2006, p. 318). The contextualist might say here that the extent to which it seems true in radical skeptical contexts that I know that I have hands is just the extent to which I am blind to the contextualist semantics of ‘know’; it seems true that I know that I have hands only because we are to some extent semantically blind. Yet this sort of explanation does nothing to push contextualism ahead of Mooreanism, for the Moorean can also appeal to semantic blindness: The extent to which it seems true in radical skeptical contexts that I don’t know that I have hands is just the extent to which I am blind to the Moorean invariantist semantics of ‘know’; it seems true that I don’t know that I have hands only because we are to some extent semantically blind (see DeRose 2006, Section 2).
And given that the Moorean and the contextualist can appeal to semantic blindness with equal effectiveness.
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Acknowledgements
For their helpful comments and criticisms, I thank Bryan Belknap, Jessica Brown, Albert Casullo, Mark Cullison, Mylan Engel, Jr., Richard Greene, Peter Murphy, Duncan Pritchard, Ray VanArragon, and especially Patrick Rysiew. I also thank audiences at California State University, Northridge; the University of Utah; the October 2002 meetings of the Central States Philosophical Association; the October 2002 Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference; the March 2003 meetings of the Society for Skeptical Studies (held in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division meetings); and the April 2003 meetings of the APA’s Central Division. Work on this project was supported by a California State University, Northridge Probationary Faculty Development Grant.
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Black, T. A Warranted-assertability Defense of a Moorean Response to Skepticism. Acta Anal 23, 187–205 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0034-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0034-0